On December 18, David House, an MIT researcher, visited Bradley Manning
at the Quantico, Virginia, military prison where he is being held in
solitary confinement. Other than Manning’s attorney, House is the rare
person allowed to visit him.

House’s report is quite thorough in pointing out
instances where the military authorities are lying -- or to use
philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s formulation, “bullshitting” -- about how
the 23-year-old Army intelligence worker is being treated.

"The human nervous system
needs a certain amount of sensory and social stimulation to retain
normal brain functioning. ... From what can be ascertained, the effects
of solitary confinement are having some effects already on Bradley
Manning. His concentration and thinking processes appear somewhat
slowed. He avoids certain topics. He has little access to humor. His
color is pale, and his musculature is starting to look soft and flabby.”

There is, unfortunately, a
long and sordid history behind this kind of “slow torture,” and the use
of it should be a battleground for all Americans still interested in
compassion, fairness and justice.

(Iraq infantry veteran Josh
Stieber, in the photo above, was a member of the ground unit shown
cleaning up after the Apache strike released by WikiLeaks as "Collateral
Murder" that showed two Reuters videographers being gunned down, plus
two kids being wounded.)

In his book A Question Of
Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War On Terror,
Alfred McCoy connects decades and billions of dollars of “black” US
torture research with the current sophisticated techniques Global War On
Terror jailers are using to torture human beings without laying a finger
on them.

The key is absolute control
-- and time. These are clearly the methods now being employed against
Manning, who is accused of leaking the WikiLeaks material. The question
is, given Manning's high-profile status, do his jailers at the Quantico,
Virginia, military facility have the necessary control and time to
really scramble young Manning's mind? And what are they after: his
mental breakdown and/or his giving up of larger prey like Julian Assange?

House’s account from his
visit with Manning suggests Manning's jailers, within the limitations
they have, are doing their best to break Manning psychologically, Their
primary limitation is the publicity surrounding the Manning case and the
fact he has a strong, and hopefully growing, support network.

Some of the restrictions
House reports would be quite absurd if they didn't make such sense as
slow torture tactics.

Guards apparently enter
Manning's cell and physically prevent him from doing exercises, which he
is permitted to do only for one hour a day -- and that amounts to
walking around in a circle in leg irons. He is not permitted any
personal items in his cell. His clothes are confiscated at night and he
must sleep in boxer shorts under a very heavy, scratchy blanket that
causes carpet burns on his skin if he moves too much. A light always
shines brightly into his cell, and he is checked on periodically all
night by guards, who often enter his cell and wake him. This is his life
day-in-day-out.

The fact Manning's jailers
are compelled to allow people like House into the prison to talk with
Manning makes "slow torture" that much more difficult, since absolute
control and the exclusion of human contact are the keys to effective
slow torture. Strong advocacy and loud public support can be
life-savers.

Matt Southworth, an Iraq vet with the
identical intelligence MOS as Manning, speaks in support of Manning

During the mid-2000s, in the
case of American citizen Jose Padilla, an entire wing of the South
Carolina military brig he was imprisoned in was expensively re-designed
for the special requirements ("theater") of his
incarceration/interrogation. From the moment of his arrest for planning
a "dirty bomb" attack Padilla was a pariah. He reportedly went three
years with absolutely no contact from family, friends or lawyers. His
only human contact was his interrogators. By the time of his trial for
charges unrelated to those he was arrested for he was a walking zombie.

Here's how Alfred McCoy
describes the process:

"(S)ensory deprivation has
evolved into a total assault on all sense and sensibilities - auditory,
visual, tactile, temporal, temperature, survival, sexual, and cultural.
Refined through years of practice, the method relies on simple, even
banal procedures -- isolation, standing, heat and cold, light and dark,
noise and silence -- for a systematic attack on all human senses."

Over decades, CIA research
delved into the ways these techniques create "a synergy of physical and
psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the fundamentals of
personal identity."

McCoy quotes Otto
Doerr-Zegers, a psychologist who treated torture victims of the regime
of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, where victims suffered "a loss of
interest that greatly surpasses anything observed in anxiety disorders."
The subject, Doerr-Zegers reported, "does not only react to torture with
a tiredness of days, weeks or months, but remains a tired human being,
relatively uninterested and unable to concentrate." Doerr-Zegers
discovered that "the psychological component of torture becomes a kind
of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a
plot that ends inexorably with the victim's self-betrayal and
destruction."

Over decades, with their
secret, black budget tax resources, the CIA contracted university
professors and psychology departments in the US and Canada to analyze
and break down the sensory deprivation process. The goal for the CIA was
to achieve the psychic destruction Doerr-Zeger spoke about without
resorting to the crude and atavistic methods of physical torture. They
discovered that parrot’s perches and thumb screws were not needed. The
goal was a form of "no touch" psychological ju-jitsu in which the
victim's own internal make-up could be manipulated and leveraged so that
over time the victim effectively destroyed himself or herself.

"Once the CIA completed its
research into no-touch torture," McCoy writes, "application of the
method was codified in the curiously named Kubark Counterintelligence
Interrogation Manual in 1963. The agency then set
about disseminating the new practices worldwide."

McCoy quotes from the Kubark Manual
that effective interrogation involves "methods of inducing regression of
the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the
dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence." The effort
is to disrupt the normal psychic process. "Such confusion can best be
effected by attacking the victim's sense of time, by scrambling the
biorhythms fundamental to every human's daily life." The goal is the
"creation of existential chaos."

They want “to manipulate the
subject’s environment, to create unpleasant or intolerable situations,
to disrupt patterns of time, space and sensory perception ... to drive
him deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able to
control his responses in an adult fashion." This last is Kubark
thinking from a CIA training manual used in Honduras during the Contra
War in the 1980s.

Kubark
and this nefarious research is one of America’s dirty little secrets.
"The American public has only a vague understanding of the scale of the
CIA's massive mind-control project," McCoy writes. "There is a willful
blindness, a studied avoidance of this deeply troubling topic."

Since the 1960s when the Kubark Manual
appeared and the 1980s when its findings surfaced in places like Central
America we've had 9/11 and its reactive Global War On Terror which led
to an even wider dissemination of “slow torture” ideas and practices
into all sorts of places -- to the point elements of it have been
standardized and adapted into the day-to-day practices of prisons all
over the United States, most especially in the notorious federal
supermax prisons.

Since absolute control of
inmate visitation and inmate cultural access is difficult in the United
States, thanks to things like the Bill Of Rights, the process has become
an imperfect back-and-forth struggle. In the case of Bradley Manning and
his high-profile status, that struggle is now on-going. Contact and
advocacy from outside is critical. In fact, it may not be excessive to
say his sanity and the future integrity of his personal identity are at
stake.

Once the fog clears, there
are two sides to the Bradley Manning/WikiLeaks story, one legal and one
moral. The United States government is playing the legal game because it
has a lot to hide under its overwhelming regime of secrecy, which of
course is all legal. Evidence suggests they are employing nefarious
methods to crush a key voice on the moral side of the dialogue.

Concerned US citizens should
do all they can to prevent the government from succeeding.

To support Bradley Manning
and oppose the government's obscene secret program of torture, sign the
petition at
FireDogLake